Category Archives: Arc 4.4: TBD

“Yeah?” He pulled the tab, and opened the can, barely seeming to care.

That annoyed me, because it wasn’t as if I’d volunteered the information. He’d asked. I didn’t see any reason to start a conversation with him. If anything, I’d be willing to go out of my way to avoid it.

I pressed the down button on the elevator. If nothing else, I could leave.

“No reason you should remember me. Like a lot of people I attended your grandfather’s funeral, but not as myself, and I wasn’t around much during the years when you were your grandfather’s lab assistant.”

That had to be how it looked from the outside. “After the Rocket’s retirement as a hero, he stayed home and worked on devices for the community with his grandson as an assistant.”

It was accurate as far as it went, but it felt less like my life, and more like I was an appendage to Grandpa’s.

The rest of the week went by in a blur, and we spent most of it in the hotel. We did take a couple field trips—probably to make it seem like we were a normal bunch of students visiting Chicago. During one field trip we went to the Field Museum.

For the other, we toured the Midwest Defenders’ Chicago headquarters.

We got a more thorough tour than most groups, but the Defenders were all out on an emergency. That was okay. As much as I missed seeing Daniel’s dad as Mindstryke, and liked most of the other members of the team, Guardian still made me feel incompetent. Continue reading TBD: Part 7→

“Now,” he said, “the first two years will be mostly classes, but in the third year your classes will include internships with nearby superheroes or superhero teams. The summers starting in your second year will all be intense physical training, and—”

The sound of someone clearing her throat sounded, audible everywhere in the conference room, but not unbearably loud. Just as obviously, it hadn’t come from the speakers near the front of the room.

Bullet scanned the crowd, all of us sitting there and watching him, and continued. “For you to understand this, we’re going to have to step back for a second and review some things that everybody thinks they know, and then I’ll tell you which ones are really true.

“Everybody knows that the Heroes League claimed to be fighting aliens in 1970’s. Some people think the aliens were faked by the government. Some even think they were really aliens, but they were hired by the government. Either way, everyone knows there are superheroes who claim to be aliens even though they look a lot like humans.”

That was all too true. The “alien” heroes I’d seen on TV could have been faked by a good special effects department. All they needed were prosthetic foreheads, pointy ears, oddly colored makeup, and weird teeth.